


Two Sides, Same Coin

by heartbeatstumbles



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen, Naruto
Genre: Gen, Introspection, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23774407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbeatstumbles/pseuds/heartbeatstumbles
Summary: Looking at Nara Shikako is almost like looking at a mirror of Hatake.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi & Nara Shikako, Morino Ibiki & Nara Shikako
Comments: 22
Kudos: 729
Collections: Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection, What Fen Do (Instead of Going Outside), When Death Loves Flamingos





	Two Sides, Same Coin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saltdoken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltdoken/gifts), [Pepperdoken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pepperdoken/gifts).



It’s after the Special Jounin party that everything clicks in place.

There’s no actual reason _why_ Ibiki knows this, but he’s been doing this for long enough to trust his instincts. Nara Shikako is hiding an incredible information source.

Nara Shikako knows too many things she’s not supposed to know, and she knows that he knows that she knows that. She as good as gave it up when he asked her about what happened in Stone, and she’s hiding something much bigger than her Stone informant. 

While she has very plausible reasons for knowing all the information she has information, and her sources are solid, he knows on an instinctive level that she’s hiding something more. As of now, she’s not a threat to Konoha, and Ibiki doubts she ever will be, but there’s something she knows that scares the fuck out of her and has done so for a very long time. 

Because of the capture and interrogation misunderstanding, Ibiki reviewed her profile from the Academy and early genin days with fresh eyes.

The Nara kid was notably sickly in school and wasn’t even expected to graduate due to her chakra hypersensitivity. According to the notes on her jutsu proficiency, she got over it and was using chakra by the time they were using chakra.

The general portrait was that she was studious, kind, and looked to her brother for social guidance. Best kunoichi, ruthless at taijutsu, (including a note on her penchant for explosive seals) but would probably get overshadowed due to her low stamina as her peers outstripped her. 

She fit the profile of a mid-to-long-range support-type or a noncombatant, possibly R&D or intel, which was pretty typical for a Nara. However, unlike her brother, her excellent taijutsu and thorough studies put her at the top of the class, landing her on Team 7. (Additional reports from the Academy indicated that she and her brother made the effort to include Uzumaki and Uchiha from the beginning, which was also incredibly convenient considering the makeup of her team.)

After graduation, however, things changed. Hatake, while a wealth of knowledge, had never taught children (As evidenced from the ANBU drills in teamwork, stealth training, swordfighting, giving them multiple jutsu and telling them to just figure it out, etc.). Uchiha was a flight risk from Day One, Uzumaki was ignored by most of the village, and she wasn’t even expected to graduate. But somehow, Nara got it to work. Hatake reported that she convinced her teammates to cooperate, actually _passed_ the bell test, and was proficient in her clan jutsu. 

The Wave mission reports indicated she had basic medic skills, sensing proficiency of a special jounin, and the ability to improvise on the fly and come out smelling like flowers in situations that could have killed anyone else.

She’s either an accidental genius or there’s something giving her an edge, because no shinobi is that lucky. But so many things have happened in her favor that it’s hard to believe it was an accident. Her sealing studies were picked up by Jiraiya, who just happened to be around. Jiraiya, who only took Uzumaki out of guilt for his father. Jiraiya, who’s practically allergic to giving _anyone_ the time of day.

It’s all of these little coincidences like this that make him certain that she knows Something.

Using her first C-rank to cultivate a relationship with a former enemy so strong that Konoha walked away with an unspoken alliance. Doing the same thing _again_ during the Sand invasion, because it sure as fuck wasn’t mercy that stayed her hand. Nara Shikako unflinchingly killed 13 people in her first Chuunin exams in a manner that no peacetime genin would ever think of. 

The reports from the Chuunin exams included multiple recommendations for her promotion, despite the fact that she surrendered to her brother without a fight. Some even indicated that she had some knowledge that something was going to happen on the day of the exam, and she prepared as much as possible while still managing to be inconspicuous. Hatake reported that she sensed Kabuto before he did, and his dog reported that she had enough supplies for everyone, didn’t lose her head, and also used a fuckton of explosives to great efficiency.

This would have stood out a lot less just ten years ago. For Ibiki’s generation, it was common to send kids on the field a lot younger - Ibiki watched from the sidelines as his age mate Kakashi was turned into one of the most brutal and broken killing machines who almost killed himself in ANBU with a single-minded intensity that often gets one killed before their time. But the relative peace has done nothing to slow her down. 

The Nara girl is driven by something similar. It’s not self-destructive in nature like it was for Hatake, but she’s going down that route either way. Punching above her weight limit, not taking breaks even after that fuckawful Hot Springs mission, and training harder and harder? Her desperation-tinged drive, while admirable (and also conveniently motivating the rest of her age group), is the kind of thing that gets people killed. 

Unfortunately, instead of holding her back and encouraging her to slow down, her team actively encourages her to speed up as much as she does. Kakashi’s team, while excellent in every way, are all a bit neurotic. He’s raising a team of, well, himself. It’s what makes them good shinobi, but it also separates them from their peers in a way that none have noticed yet. 

To be fair, Uchiha’s drive to kill his terrorist brother is actually pretty reasonable. Uzumaki didn’t ask to be chased by a group of shinobi that could eliminate a continent, and jinchuuriki are pretty much slated for a non-existent childhood. He can’t even blame Nara for being overly cautious _now_ , given the disasters in Sand/Grass/Hot Springs/tendency for every mission she takes to go off the rails. But Nara is clearly driven by something bigger, because she’s been preparing for it since the beginning. She and Uchiha are really drifting from their peers, which only exacerbates their willingness to drive themselves into the ground in the quest to get stronger.

Both Nara and Uchiha joined ANBU young, young enough to raise the same red flags that were raised for Uchiha Itachi. There’s nothing indicating that these two might go batshit insane, but there wasn’t any warning that Itachi was going to either. People who joined ANBU young don’t have great tracks for sanity records. Ibiki’s pretty sure the most well-adjusted member of ANBU that joined that young was Tenzo, and that was only because Tenzo was dragged into feeling things headfirst by Kakashi.

Ironically, Kakashi isn’t really that well-adjusted himself, but he’s such a good ninja that everyone just shoves it under the rug (not unlike the man himself) and waits for Yamanaka to pound some coping mechanisms into him during the inevitable breakdown and string the man back together with some toothpicks and glue before sending him on three back-to-back S-ranks because Hatake and Tenzou are the only two of their generation good enough to leave a legacy like the Sannin or Minato, and neither are the flashy type.

Kakashi’s been doing better lately, and it’s all because of his students. While harsh, it was a good thing that he rejected his five previous teams, because he hasn’t been doing so well in years. 

(To say nothing of how much it would break him if he lost one of them, but that’s Inoichi’s problem. Or Tsunade’s.) 

Nobody knew what the fuck the Sandaime was thinking giving him a team of his dead teacher’s son, the ghost of a giant mistake, and a sickly girl, but it was clearly a genius decision in the disguise of a trainwreck, because it actually worked. Hatake’s no longer dying of some Sharingan eye thing; Team Kakashi is going to be any field ninja’s worst nightmare in just a few years to boot. Maybe even a few months, at the pace that Nara and Uchiha are going. 

The younger Uchiha is doing a commendable job and shaping up to be one of the potential commanders, but Nara is the ace in the hole. Naras are rarely ANBU, due to their penchant for desk jobs and better use in tactics and intel, but this one is breaking the mold. Her quiet, unassuming, borderline frail image compared to Uchiha and Uzumaki is something she uses with almost practiced efficiency, and she knows how to capitalize on that to the fullest. The team functions as one.

She’s almost a mirror of Hatake. They’re both wiry, unassuming, and incredible at improvising on the fly. They aren’t quite the same, there are actually quite a few differences between them - Hatake was a prodigy at four, grew up in wartime, has exponentially more damage - but the bones are the same. Both were on Team 7, for example.

Team 7, the odds-and-ends team, is almost always a complete hit or miss. The mix between the front-runners of the year and the one who didn’t know how to give up but still scraped by is always interesting to watch. In recent years, there hasn’t been much luck, but Nara and Uchiha’s graduating class was chock full of talent and clan heirs, so they were one to watch. It was the same with Hatake’s team.

The parallels are eerie. A medic, a prodigious clan heir, and an outcast of a prominent clan - _again_. Team Minato was on track to being the next Sannin before they were ripped apart by truly unprecedented circumstances, instead leaving behind a broken boy and a power void in Konoha in the span of months.

Team Kakashi is already good, will undoubtedly be great, but a meteoric rise often means a meteoric fall.

Ibiki hopes that isn’t what happens to them.


End file.
